Sick

I've been laying around (mostly in bed) since Friday night. I have a cold, my third of the season, one of the hazards of working with germy elementary students. I'm not particularly adept at being sick in any circumstances, but being sick while being pregnant is a whole new level of selfishness and misery. I want the real drugs! Dayquil and Nyquil and Tylenol PM... Being sacrificial is not natural. Despite efforts to eat without ceasing, i'm losing weight again, back down to 5 pounds under my pre-pregnancy weight. That scared me, so it was off to the doctor to give blood for tests. When I'm frightened for the baby's sake, it's much easier to be sacrificial. In reality, I'm only trading one sin (selfishness) for another (anxiety). So what I'm finding is that being pregnant and sick is really all about my sanctification.

Offshore Outsourcing of White-Collar Jobs

Perhaps Dorothy Sayers is a prophet? According to Bob Herbert's Op-Ed in the NY Times, corporate America is outsourcing its white-collar jobs to countries such as China, Russia, and India -- countries with "strong educational heritages."

Whether it becomes a boon to the U.S. economy or not, the trend toward upscale outsourcing is a fact, and it is accelerating. In an important interview with The San Jose Mercury News last month, the chief executive of Intel, Craig Barrett, talked about the integration of India, China and Russia -- with a combined population approaching three billion -- into the world's economic infrastructure.

"I don't think this has been fully understood by the United States," said Mr. Barrett. "If you look at India, China and Russia, they all have strong education heritages. Even if you discount 90 percent of the people there as uneducated farmers, you still end up with about 300 million people who are educated. That's bigger than the U.S. work force."

He said: "The big change today from what's happened over the last 30 years is that it's no longer just low-cost labor that you are looking at. It's well-educated labor that can do effectively any job that can be done in the United States."

What will the response, if any, of public education officials be?

Updates

+ At the recommendation of several friends, we bought Husband-Coached Childbirth by Robert Bradley, M.D. today. Any thoughts on the Bradley Method® of Natural Childbirth?
+ I added two more albums to our pictures page.

Update

Lately, I've been reading and writing like crazy. Sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for teaching applications. I'm rather sad because I haven't started on my fiction list yet.

I'll probably be blogging less and commenting less. I find that I usually don't like the conversations. It is typical that I'm arguing my case against another and, now that I'll be a paid for my wisdom and ability to share it, I'm holding out for a glass of wine.

Also, I'm working on a lot of curriculum writing. It has usually been the case at all the schools I've seen that they REALLY don't like their curriculum. Frankly, I can't blame them. I don't think the ideal curriculum (for Latin, that is) exists -- it certainly doesn't for Greek. So, I'm spending some time preparing my own supplements to curricula that I like. I compared Ecce Romani, Jenney's Latin, and The Cambridge Latin Course, and I preferred Ecce. It appears to be more readable and workable. From my viewpoint, it only lacks grammar and sentence exercises ... and I can create that!

I'm also trying to think about Greek curriculum (all for younger kids, that is). There really isn't anything. I'll have to start working with the kids before I can determine if Wilding's work -- which was created for British school boys -- would actually work with school aged children. From what I see with my friend who teaches from it (to seventh and eighth graders) is that they are completely bored. You can't force a child to learn something if they and the parents don't believe in the subject. You can teach complicated things if you can't force them to do. Latin is a subject where the benefits and results are not immediately clear. Very few parents and students (even in Classical schools) swallow the "trust me, it'll pay off" line easily.

Silly Society

A South African living in Omaha was suspended for agreeing to promote himself for his high school's "Distinguished African American Student" award. I had a friend from Governor's School in high school who got in trouble with the College Board or the ACT people (can't remember which) for bubbling African American, despite his duel citizenship in South Africa and the United States. I think we ought to just stop using the term African American altogether. I don't know of any black people who mind being called black. Heck, my alma mater is building a colossal Black Cultural Center and nobody complained. Tarheels are prone to protest, so, if none of the students there cared, its a pretty good indication that blacks as a whole are fine with being called black.

Phonograms

Andy asked about phonograms, so here's an explanation for all of you who are older than 16 and don't teach elementary schoolers:

Phonogram is a word that, from its roots, means "written sound." The 70 basic phonograms consist of all of the letters of the alphabet and then letter combinations that make specific sounds, such as "ph" "ei" "ea" "ough" et. al. When you learn the phonograms, you learn the written part and all of its sounds. For example, "c" has two sounds, "k" as in call and "s" as in center. "Ch" has three sounds, the "ch" of chief, the "k" of Christ and the "sh" of chef. You say the sounds in their order of frequency. That way, a person trying to decode an unfamiliar word while reading has basic tools to do so. Now we are doing the much more complicated exercise of trying to idenify all of the ways you can spell a sound. You'd be suprised all the ways English can render long a or oo, etc.

Teaching

I am halfway through my tenure, marked by having finished my second set of narrative report cards. We finished Little House in the Big Woods today, so we will celebrate by making pound cake and fresh lemonade from the The Little House Cookbook. I'm excited about starting The Great Brain. We are slowly but surely learning Latin and Greek roots together, and have mastered all 70 basic phonograms. My students were amazed to learn that I never learned them when I was a kid. Schools were different then, I tell them. I feel so... old.

Pictures!

We have pictures posted ... but no wedding pictures. We are working on those. However, if you click over to the images page, you'll find links to the various albums.

Sabbath Reflection

When Christ's appearing was made known,
King Herod trembled for his throne;
But He Who offers heavenly birth
Sought not the kingdom of this earth.

The eastern sages saw from far
And followed on His guiding star;
By light their way to Light they trod,
And by their gifts confessed their God.

Within the Jordan's sacred flood
The heavenly Lamb in meekness stood,
That He, to Whom no sin was known,
Might cleanse His people from their own.

And O what miracle divine,
When water reddened into wine!
He spake the word, and forth it flowed
In streams that nature ne'er bestowed.

All glory, Jesus, be to Thee
For this Thy glad epiphany:
Whom with the Father we adore
And Holy Ghost forevermore.
--Caelius Sedulius

[we sing this to a wonderful tune written by Leonard Payton]

Show Me the Heresy

From NT Wright's What Saint Paul Really Said:

[summarizing] For Paul, 'the gospel' creates the church; 'justification' defines it. The gospel announcement carries its own power to save people, and to dethrone the idols to which they had been they had been bound. 'The Gospel' itselt is neither a system of thought, nor a set of techniques for making people Christians; it is the personal announcement of the person of Jesus. That is why it creates the church, the people who believe that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. 'Justification' is then the doctrine which declares that those people are truly members of his family, no matter where they came from, what colour their skin may be, whatever else might distinguish them from each other. The gospel itself creates the church; justification continually reminds the church that it is the people created by the gospel and the gospel alone, and that it must live on that basis.

He Just Doesn't Learn ...

I'm not sure what effect it will have on the evangelical masses, but NT Wright has written a new forward to the evangelical staple, FF Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

Will they be outraged that he put his mark on one of their favourites? or will they finally realized that (Hey!) he too is an evangelical?

Books Read

A lot of people have recently began listing the books that they have read this past year. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory. However, I'm going to keep track this year so next year, I'll know.

I was also cursed by having professors who didn't assign entire books, so I can't say that I've read Confessions, but I did read selections. Same with the Iliad, Odyssey, Herodotus, Thucydides, etc.. etc.. etc...